I like this part: "If you are not a good photographer with a good camera, you will not be a good photographer with a smartphone, Park said. If you are not a good photographer with a smartphone, you will not be a good photographer with an expensive camera."

Open discussion on what constitutes a 'good photographer'!

Mike.

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If your mind is attuned to beauty, you find beauty in everything.~ Jean Cooke ~

Samsung just a few days ago announced a new camera/phone; the Galaxy S4 Zoom. It's the first camera operating on the Android OS to include voice capability for calling. There have been cameras released previously that used the Android OS and Samsung had a version with both wifi and cellular wireless but without calling functionality. PetaPixel made a big deal of it. The only big deal is why it took so long.

Time magazine has been at the forefront of new media. They were one of the first to drop a print edition and go entirely digital. Their digital offering was, when it was launched a few years ago, miles ahead of anything anyone else was producing. Probably still is.

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I like this part: "If you are not a good photographer with a good camera, you will not be a good photographer with a smartphone, Park said. If you are not a good photographer with a smartphone, you will not be a good photographer with an expensive camera."

We're seeing just the first wave of the cell phone revolution. The handiness of it and the fast developing technology bringing the image to its end use will further erode both the "real" camera benefits as we know it and the fees for its related photography services.

I can imagine, for example, that soon a wedding photographer's shooting will be the core images with the photographer then serving as an image editor, culling shots from guests' cell phones and incorporating all into digital streams and products. I'm sure some wedding photographers are doing something on this track now.

Art show photographers have already seen sales decline because of the improving quality of tourist snaps that are easily edited in-camera and can be forwarded to their phone list, social sites, or to any on line print provider. Maybe that's why so many art show exhibitors reach for other forms of presentation (metal prints, large canvasses, heavy HDR, etc.) to try to keep ahead of the quickly developing customer-produced work.

All in all it's an exciting time, akin to the more gradual, comparatively, transition from film to digital.

I believe this story is about Henry Cartier Bresson, cited from memory:He went in a famous restaurant, the chef recogniced him, went to his table and said "You make excellent pictures, you have to have a very good camera". HCB replied: "You make delicious meals, you have to have excellent pots".

So I guess it's clear as black ink that a good photographer is the one with the excellent pots.

I can imagine, for example, that soon a wedding photographer's shooting will be the core images with the photographer then serving as an image editor, culling shots from guests' cell phones and incorporating all into digital streams and products. I'm sure some wedding photographers are doing something on this track now.

At a recent wedding for 20-somethings I attended, the guests were provided with a web address and asked to upload the pictures they took. (Wedding also was photographed traditionally by a pro -- though the "creative" approach to the posed B&G and group shots resulted in some simply awful stuff IMO, but then I am quite a few years away from being a 20-something....)

First wave? More like the fourth or fifth. The first wave would have been the initial crop of cell phones (not smartphones) that also had cameras. The second wave would have been the first iPhone with its reasonably decent camera. The third wave would have been the smartphones that had pretty darn good cameras that were the equal of the small, pocketable P&S cameras. The fourth wave would have been the phones like from Nokia with its Pureview sensor. Then came the P&S cameras that incorporated Android for wifi connectivity. Now we have the fifth wave with a full P&S camera/phone in combination and like the new One from HTC which is reducing pixel count in order to improve image quality.

We now have a major (perhaps soon to be not so major) daily newspaper that's, largely, going to rely on smartphone photography and video for its business.

I downloaded an app the other day that allows me to annotate images on the phone or a tablet. In the past, with film, if I were shooting a number of different locations for a project, I'd shoot a frame of a handwritten notebook that told me what frames were of what subject. Now, I can simply start by taking a shot with my smartphone, add a note to the image, then fire away on the 'real' shots with a DSLR. That's something the article linked originally doesn't take into account: apps. The apps available for photographers are terrific. From editing to controlling the camera for both stills and video to note-taking and on. It's a terrific time for photography.

Did you mean the posed pro results were awful, or that the "creative" shots by guests were awful? I've seen some pretty wretched "candid" results from pros also.

Pro results were awful. She posed the wedding party in this almost barren landscape, broke it up into smallish groups placed here and there in the frame had had them give some attitude. Yuck, at least she didn't HDR the results. Take your aesthetic cues from social media and you're in a race to the bottom, if you ask me.

Pro results were awful. She posed the wedding party in this almost barren landscape, broke it up into smallish groups placed here and there in the frame had had them give some attitude. Yuck, at least she didn't HDR the results. Take your aesthetic cues from social media and you're in a race to the bottom, if you ask me.

I won't name the magazine but it features many of the most terrible bridal images you could imagine as a keepsake. The race to the bottom seems to be heralded in part by the very media that professes to cater to professional photographers. The whole "Trash the Dress" and other, even more grotesque efforts seem to be what some pros are selling these days for techniques. It may be a cute thing to put on social media to those seeking a quick laugh. But by next month it'll just look stupid.

I do a lot of composite work featuring 100-year-old photographs of people and see thousands of wedding pictures as I scout the antique malls. The only images that are kept over the years are those of the bride and groom in traditional poses. Extremely few of the wedding party. And none of drunken aunt Betty with cake icing on her dress. The only positive result is that most of that dreck will never be printed and the rest quickly discarded.

The only images that are kept over the years are those of the bride and groom in traditional poses.

Exactly, Lou. And it's not just photography. Try painting, sculpture, poetry, music. . . The dreck always falls away after a while, which is why the most known and loved paintings at the moment are from the Impressionists. They painted in a period when there was a deluge of flat art, yet to learn anything about most of their contemporaries you need a course in art history and some serious research. Without naming names, I'll predict that in a hundred years (at 83 that doesn't sound like all that many) a majority of the painters and photographers who, at the moment, are drawing down millions for their atrocities and ho-hums will essentially be unknown. The art that survives will be art that people can look at and understand without a course in art history.

And though I've said it before, I'll say it again: "professional" means you make money at what you do, not necessarily that you're any good at it.

I'll predict that in a hundred years (at 83 that doesn't sound like all that many) a majority of the painters and photographers who, at the moment, are drawing down millions for their atrocities and ho-hums will essentially be unknown. The art that survives will be art that people can look at and understand without a course in art history.

Oh, I fear that the dreck you speak of will most definitely be entrenched well into the future. Al least the one's that fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars and upwards. Art is very Much an investment Biz. Art today is all about the anointing and keeping the anointed at value. The general public has no clue about todays art scene. Good, bad or indifferent.